A Canadian bloke was gunned down after he tracked his phone to where a thief had taken it using something like a "Find my Phone" app.

At this point it is not clear what the app Jeremy Cook used was, or what type of phone he had, but appears he thought that by showing up at the thieves' house he would get his phone back.

After leaving his phone in a taxi, Cook traced it to an address on Highbury Avenue and then he went to find it with a relative. When he arrived at the address, he was confronted by three young men in a car. It's not entirely clear what happened next, but police say that the vehicle began to drive away when Cook tried to get his phone back, at which point he grabbed on the driver's side door. Shots where then fired at him, and he ultimately died.

The car and phone have been recovered later, but Cook's attackers are still missing, with police looking for three men with ages between 18 and 21.

It is the first case of serious violence from someone tracking a lost smartphone online.

The Police said that while the app itself is a great tool. Nobody could ever predict that what occurred was going to occur in that case.

"But if you suspect there's any potential for violence at all, we certainly encourage people to contact police. We'd be more than happy to come out and investigate with the hopes of retrieving the phone," a Police spokesman said.

Fruity cargo cult Apple's attempts to squeeze money from newspapers has failed completely and the outfit has pulled its much marketed Newsstand App.

Newstand basically allowed a select bunch of newspapers to run their content on the glorious Apple machines, for a fee.

However like most things Applish, the set up was designed to suit Jobs' Mob. Apple controlled all the data, which was how the publishers' made money. Jobs' Mob also insisted on deciding how the magazines could be received and marketed. Subscriptions had to go through Apple, and it kept a 30 per cent cut. Every time. When loyal readers simply resubscribed Apple hassled them for money and it stuck publishers in its own folder.

In short Apple scared the publishers off and no one wanted to play with it any more.

In the end Apple worked out that treating the publishers like shit was not going to work any more and pulled the plug on the app.

Now it seems that Apple has learnt a bit from its mistakes. Susan Prescott, app product development veep, said that a new News app will be added to people's iPhones and iPads when they upgrade to iOS 9.

Apple has worked out it can't keep content out and expect to be successful. So it pulls in content not in its own format. It has also realized that it needs to provide content on a per-article rather than per-publication basis.

It is copied from the Flipboard app in that you can flip through website articles and tap to read them. The new software can pull in articles from across the internet.

However it seems that Jobs' Mob is still trying to control much of the content through its "Apple News format." Apple will try to drive subscriptions to those publishers that use the Apple format by offering specific "channels".

It has signed up the exact same people as it did when it launched Newsstand four years ago -- its favourites which advertise Apple such as the New York Times. Don't expect to see Fud there any time soon.

Qualcomm has released a new Trepn Profiler app for Android which will profile Snapdragon processors and tinker with them.

The Trepn Profiler app identifies apps that overwork the CPU or are eating too much data. The app will pinpoint which of the apps drain the battery faster.

All data that will be obtained by this app can provide information you need to know which program is slowing down your phone.

Frankly my dear...

Most Android phone users will not give a damn, but developers will find it useful. Those who are interested in testing roms, custom kernels, and their own apps can use the data gathered by the Trepn Profiler.

Developers can measure optimisation and performance on Snapdragon-powered mobile devices. Data are real-time include network usage, battery power, GPU frequency load, and CPU cores' load. Key features also include six fast-loading profiling presets, and an advanced mode to manually select data points and save for analysis.

The Advanced Mode allows profiling a single app or device, offline data analysis, and increasing of data collection interval. This special mode also allows longer profiling sessions, displaying two data point in one overlay, and viewing of profile data.

All up this should enable developers to come up with more Snapdragon friendly apps

Google will let you use the search engine on your desktop computer to find your lost phone.

The idea is that if you install the latest version of its main Android app you can type in "find my phone" and let Google find it for you.

If your phone is nearby, Google can ring it for you. If it's further away, Google will show you it on a map.

Google introduced a tool called Android Device Manager in August 2013. The website and app can find lost phones and tablets (running Android 2.2 Froyo and above) by ringing them or showing them on a map.

If your device cannot be found or retrieved, Android Device Manager also lets you securely erase all of the data on your device. This ensures your data doesn't end up in the wrong hands.

There are a couple of things which bother us about this app. Firstly if you can find out where your phone is, then so can spooks, private investigators, jealous spouses, or US drones. All the hacker has to do is attack whatever security the system has on it.At this point it is not clear what protection your phone has against these outside threats. But perhaps the biggest threat is from Google.

If Google knows where your phone is, the temptation for them to flog you location based advertising is going to be too much.

It appears that a mobile phone app is one of the key weapons against the most deadly virus humanity has seen since the Black Death.

Official’s fighting Ebola at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are turning to the latest tools and technology are using a Microsoft mobile app to speed contact tracing everyone exposed to a person with a contagious disease and help with the collection and management of data on every case.

The VHF application enables users to set up databases of patient information, including names, gender, ages, locations, status and Epi Case Classification, for suspected case, confirmed case or not a case.

Marking people as “sick and isolated” automatically converts them into cases, according to CodePlex, a project for hosting open-source software, and that reduces data entry errors and lessens data management for public health responders.

Through the app, users can quickly see virus transmission diagrams that help field workers visualize an outbreak’s reach, according to a CDC statement. What’s more, it works in places with limited connectivity and information technology support, because once it’s downloaded and installed, it requires no Internet connection.

Epi Info works only with Microsoft Windows operating systems and uses Microsoft Access to store questionnaires and data.

Sometime last week Google pushed out a new update for its Gmail Android app that brought new visual changes including conversation view with card-based design, improved sync and outbox and a couple of other updates, as well as support for ads, found burried deep in the APK, according to Android Police.

During the teardown of the APK, Android Police discovered that there are multiple references to ads in the code of the app meaning that it is quite possible that we will soon see some of them in the Gmail Android app as well. It is still not clear how will the app actually show those ads and where will they be as, hopefully, will not ruin the Gmail app and become overly intrusive.

Google puts a lot of faith in ads and Gmail is quite popular making it an obvious choice for Google. According to the teardown, Google has a total of eight different classes including toasts, teaser, sender header, ad header, ad border, and the ad view.

In any case we will know for sure once Google enables them officially.

While Android owners will still have to wait, Microsoft has delivered its first version of the SmartGlass application for the Apple iOS platform. The application can be downloaded from the Apple App store for iOS devices running version 5 of iOS or higher, but it does not yet support the iPhone 5 in native screen formatting; so if you have the iPhone 5, you will have to deal with it for the time being.

The application replaces the Xbox for iOS application that Microsoft released previously, so this will be the Xbox application for iOS owners. The SmartGlass application does look like it supports pretty much the same stuff the old application did, so there is no loss in functionality.

Once the application is installed, Xbox 360 owners will be able to enjoy both Forza Horizon and Dance Central 3, which are the first two applications that offer optional SmartGlass support.

Look for our update on SmartGlass with Forza Horizon in the next couple of days to get our real world impressions on the usefulness of it with the game.

It has been a while since Apple introduced its new iPad with new A5X dual core, quad core graphics and since the initial release, the product has been on allocation. Well not anymore, as a quick check of Apple's US web store and few stores in bigger and smaller European countries reveals.

If you buy any of the new iPads, they will ship without any delays. After the launch, it took up to three weeks of waiting to get the new iPad but now it ships on the same day.

It is also cute that in European markets you are getting Wi-Fi + Cellular iPad and now iPad 4G. This is more of less false advertising, as the iPad’s 4G was not supported in European networks due ro different frequencies and bands used.

If you are in the mood for some latest trends, a Retina 15 inch Apple notebook it will cost you between €2279 or €2899 for a better strapped model. If you pick a 100MHz faster CPU, 16GB of Ram and 768 GB of SSD memory, you will hit "magical" €3849 euro.

A decent mouse and fancy carry bag and such will easily tip i over to 4000 euro. In fact, just picking a few cables and converters from Apple store got us to €4163 and this is not the end of it.

One can be only lucky that Apple doesn’t make cars or TVs. Otherwise you would be talking to your bank about additional mortgage, most probably the third one.

With Apple already facing charges that it stole the name iPad from a Chinese business, it now seems to have angered writers by stealing their books.

A group of 22 Chinese authors have filed a claim against U.S. technology group Apple, claiming that its App Store flogs unlicensed copies of their books. According to the Chinese official media, the Writers Rights Alliance petitioned Apple last year to stop electronic distribution of the writers' books and had earlier persuaded Baidu, China's largest search engine, to stop publishing their material on its Baidu Library product.

Nothing happened so the writers want Apple to write a cheque for $8 million saying it was selling pirated versions of 95 books via its online store. Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu said that as an IP holder Apple understood the importance of protecting intellectual property, and when we receive complaints we respond promptly and appropriately.

Although ukulele isn't quite one's go to instrument when it comes to…well, whatever really, this unholy patchwork consisting of an iPhone, iPad and an app still looks mighty cool. Namely, Amidio Inc. released its ukulele synthesizer app that uses both Apple's devices to play.

The devices connect via Bluetooth, where the iPhone acts as a neck while the iPad simulates the strings. The iPhone supports 12 chords per song and chord sets can apparently be changed while playing.

The app is due in April but until then, indulge in the video after the break.